Record flooding in 2011 took a heavy toll on Thailand, leading to an estimated $45 billion worth of damage, large swathes of agricultural and residential land inundated, millions left homeless or displaced, and over 9,000 factories forced to temporarily close. In the wake of the disaster, there were calls for more integrated planning of flood and water resources management to avoid such catastrophic impacts of extreme weather in the future.

Aligning with this goal, since 2017, ICEM has been supporting Thailand’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) with the development of an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) modeling tool to understand the impact of different management strategies and contribute to the development of basin-wide master plans.

An important part of the project has been capacity building. Between August 2017 and June 2018, DWR staff from central and regional levels received training on how to use the modelling tool and applied it to two pilot sites: Eastern Coast River Basins and Nam Phong River Basin. Trainees learned how to process all input data required for building a model, and tested possible scenarios addressing flood, climate change, water allocation, crop and reservoir management.

Strengthening the capacity in effective integrated water resource management will have a significant impact on Thailand’s ability to create sustainable and climate resilient solutions that mitigate against disaster and protect livelihoods within river basins.

Four key outputs were produced as part of Phase I of the project – the IWRM User Guide (translated into Thai), which provides step by step instructions on how to use the IWRM modelling tool; two reports presenting preliminary findings […]